Do you want to live an abundant life? Then you have to reign in your will and align yourself to THE Divine Will. Listen to this episode as Amy Killingsworth explains how we’re at the mercy of chaos, meaningless death, and destruction if we don’t follow the light. Since we have free will, we have to make the conscious decision to follow God. Otherwise, we’re following the kingdom of darkness by default. Which kingdom do you want to be a part of? Tune in and choose life!

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Reigning In Your Will: Living An Abundant Life With God

This episode is about the will. I’m super excited about this episode because I was looking at it and I was trying to figure out, “Do I have enough content to make an entire episode out of the will?” The will is the seat of your sovereignty. Earlier in the season, I handled sovereignty and consent in great detail. I was thinking, “Do I have enough content to do an episode for the will by itself?” As I got into it, it was so rich and robust. I’m super excited to share and expand upon the concept of the will as it pertains to sovereignty and how we relate to God. It’s super important.

A little bit of review and recap. We are in the middle of a mini-series on the complex of the soul. Rise to Reign is a framework for life healing that focuses on seven principles of wisdom or seven keys applied to seven categories. The seven categories are the body, soul, spirit, relationships, finances, creativity, and the pinnacle is your calling. It’s a process that you work through to apply the seven principles of wisdom to the seven categories of your life, which will lead you to a place of a character being able to discover and sustain your calling while loving your life. It’s a process of life healing.

Within the category of the soul, we have the complex of the soul, which is the mind, the will and the emotions. You can think about the soul as I want, I think, I feel. It’s the complexity of the human personality and there are two manifestations of it. The heart is the purity of who you are before you experienced trauma and before the world made an overlay of what could be called brokenness or unhealthy cells of relating.

The soul is the concept of that heart but also all of our emotional patterns. What we’re wanting to do is discover and gain self-awareness so that we can gain self-mastery over the soul and bring our true heart, our true character, our true personality that God created us with to the forefront, without all of the patterns of dysfunction that cause all kinds of problems. Within that complex of the soul is the will. The will encompasses our wants, desires, choices, decisions, willingness and consent.

What’s exciting about the will is that it’s what sets us apart. This concept of free will is at the core of what humanity is. I refer a lot to human beings as image-bearers. We are made in the image of God. This free will concept is what sets humankind apart from any other created being. We have to have a little bit of a review of sovereignty before we get into what I want to cover where the will is concerned.

God’s Sovereignty

The sovereignty of God is a great place to start when you want to understand your own sovereignty or human sovereignty. God has supreme authority, control and rule over the entire multiverse. That is the universe that we live in and any other universe. All of the created order is ruled by God. He is sovereign over and has control over all of that, but God made us in his image and he granted us free will, which means that even though he can, he doesn’t violate our free will. It’s a law that he has set up. He doesn’t force us or control us into doing anything.

Which when we get to relationships is an important characteristic of God to model ourselves after. He doesn’t force or control or manipulates us ever. What does happen is that he sets our life up. He uses our sovereignty to set our life up with a guard rail system to try and steer us in the right direction, to get us to make the right decisions. As any good father does, he fathers us. At the end of the day, we have to make the decision that we need to make because we have free will and he doesn’t violate that.

The glory of God is you living at the highest level. Click To Tweet

God made us in his image and granted us free will. Our free will is the seat of our sovereignty. God’s sovereignty supersedes ours, which means that he is supreme or sovereign over all the seven-point whatever billion people in the universe, all the animals, the environment, the created order, all the governments and everything. When God sees and has a perspective, it has everything considered. Our perspective is very myopic. We can only see what’s in front of our faces. Even the wisest among us can’t see on the level that God sees.

When God plays sort of 5D Chess with our lives, it’s because he can see the future. He can see the past. He can see all of that without any emotional programming or lenses. He can see all of the people involved. He can see all the past people involved, all the future people involved, and every possible timeline. When God helps, leads, guides and disciplines us, it’s from that perspective of his sovereignty. While he doesn’t enforce a decision on us, he often sets us up to be in a place to see what we need to see and experience what we need to see, and experience to make the right decisions.

God’s Will For You

Let’s talk about God’s will for a moment. We’re made in the image of God. When we have free will, it is modeled after the divine will. One of the quotes that I love to live my life by is not from the Bible but it’s from someone called St. Irenaeus. He said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” That’s at its heart. That’s what the show is all about. I always say our tagline, which is God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life. God wants you fully alive. God wants you to recover your heart. God wants you in righteousness, peace and joy. That is what you were created for.

The glory of God is you living at the highest level. Before you think that that might sound selfish, please pay attention to what kind of a parent you are when you are joyful, what kind of an employee you are when you are joyful, or what kind of work and art you’re putting out into the world when you have peace. One of the things that are obvious about our world is that it’s reeling. Many things seem to be falling apart and there is a lot of chaos, destruction and suffering. It’s so easy to look at the macro and be like, “Government this and healthcare that,” and all of the issues, problems, hunger, poverty, sex trafficking, and all the things that are going wrong in our world.

If you drill down and keep pulling back layers, all of those problems are rooted in a single human being, their commitments, their decisions, their choices and their beliefs. The most profound work that we can do in the world and for the world is to align our internal reality with God’s plan and God’s will. God’s will is for you to be totally healed and to live in total abundance, total freedom and total restoration in this life and the next.

If you have hung around Christianity at any length of time or lots of religions, there’s a big focus on eternity and the afterlife. I’m not discounting that, but we can’t focus on that to the exclusion of what’s going on here now because we’re here for a reason. If anything can be said about God, it can be said that God is very intentional. He doesn’t make mistakes and he doesn’t do things randomly. There’s nothing random about God. Everything is strategic and precise.

That’s hard to swallow when you look around and see all of the chaos and the destruction in the world. This is the thing that always trips people up about believing in God, loving God and surrendering their life to God is that, “If God is good and God is loving, why did my parent die? Why did that happen to me? How can he allow six-year-olds to be forced into brothels?” Looking at the chaos and the mayhem of the world and saying, “If God is good, why does he allow this?” It comes down to this issue of sovereignty and free will.

 

You can’t have it both ways. Either God is a monarch that is controlling everybody and making everybody’s decisions and making sure everybody makes the right decisions and we’re robots or automatons and everything is good and perfect, or he gives us the dignity of causality, as Pascal said. He gives us free will and if we use it wrongly, things get messed up. I want to reinforce this idea that there’s no greater work that you can do for the world and to heal your internal reality and to align your will with the divine will.

There are a couple of scriptures here. Jeremiah 29:11 is a famous one. This is God speaking to Israel or his people and people, in general. “’I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you, to give you hope and a future.’” Psalm 27:13, David says, “I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Meaning now, not just in the life to come. I want to take a quick detour and talk about the nature of reality. Our present 3D reality, the world that we live in is an epic clash between darkness and light.

Ultimately, every single one of us has to use our free will to choose which kingdom we’re going to align ourselves with. By default, you’re aligned with darkness. I’m not going to get into the theology of that. This goes back to consent. Unless you have made a decision and planted your flag and declared for the kingdom of light, then your implied consent is that you’re aligned with the kingdom of darkness.

The Kingdoms Of Light And Darkness

This show doesn’t have time and space to get into the theology and the how’s and why’s of that. That’s the presupposition that I’ll hope you’ll go with on. Your consent is implied to be aligned with the kingdom of darkness unless you have openly and emphatically stated and declared for your consent to be aligned with the kingdom of light. Let’s talk about the characteristics of these two kingdoms. One is dark and one is light, but sometimes it’s a little bit confusing.

In John 10:10, we see the description between the two kingdoms. “The thief comes to kill, steal and destroy, but Jesus came so that we may have life abundantly and to the full.” You can look at the kingdom of light as ruled by Christ and the Father and the Holy Spirit. You can look at the kingdom of darkness as ruled by Satan and his demons. That’s light and dark. How do we know the difference between the two? One is life and one is death. The thief or the adversary comes to steal, kill and destroy.

Anytime you see loss, death or destruction, that’s the kingdom of darkness. Jesus came that we may have life abundantly and to the full. Life and all of its manifestations come from the kingdom of light. Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “I set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life that you and your descendants may live.” We have to actively choose and declare for life.

I know that seems like a weird thing, “Who would choose death?” We choose death a lot because we are deceived. I mentioned in the previous episode about Eve and the Garden of Eden. She chose death, but she didn’t know she was choosing death. She was deceived into believing a lie that God was holding out on her and therefore, she made a choice that resulted in her death and many other deaths. She didn’t know that that’s what she was choosing. She was deceived.

Each of us needs to use our free will to choose which kingdom we'll align ourselves with: darkness or light. Click To Tweet

It’s important that we have discernment. This is why I got excited about this show is because there’s an easy way to discern between light and dark. It’s life and death. The offer is abundant life in the kingdom of light or death and destruction in the kingdom of darkness, but you have to choose. Remember, you can give your sovereignty away, but you can’t give your responsibility away. Even like Eve, if you make a decision that you don’t necessarily know that the contract is spelled out before you and you give your informed consent to it, you can give your implied consent to the kingdom of darkness and you can reap death and destruction from it. I hope that that’s making sense.

What or who then is light? John 1:4, talking about Jesus, said, “In him was life and that life was the light of men.” John 8:12, “Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Light and life are inextricably connected. The kingdom of light brings life. Colossians 1:13, “He’s rescued us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the son that he loves.”

When you declare for the kingdom of light and align will with the divine will, you’re rescued and translated out of that dominion of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of light. Choosing light, therefore, is choosing to align ourselves with Christ’s kingdom by submitting our will to the divine will, which results in life’s abundant life. If we don’t actively choose light, we choose darkness by default. This is implied consent. There’s no gray or undecided area. It’s a simple decision of the will.

When I started getting into this episode, I was like, “This is important.” It’s important that you know this. This is me giving you informed consent. After you read to this and you decide, “I want to align myself with darkness,” go right ahead. You have free will, but you’ll know what you’re doing. In order to exercise informed consent, you need to be educated. That’s what this is.

There are two kingdoms. Darkness, the agenda is to steal, kill and destroy. Light, the agenda is abundant life. Until we align ourselves with the kingdom of light by choice of our will, we are in the domain of darkness and that kingdom has full reign over us, which includes death, loss and destruction. Once we align with the kingdom of light and submit our will to the divine will where we’re part of the kingdom of light and our life becomes very strategic.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t have problems. I’m going to get into this a little bit deeper. I want to clarify. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a loss. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have pain and it doesn’t mean that you don’t have difficulty. It means that your life becomes strategic. If you’re not aligned, if you haven’t actively aligned yourself with light, you are at the mercy of chaos and meaningless death and destruction. This is where we start to give structure to and meaning to our pain and our suffering.

The offer that we’re given by the creator is abundant life. That’s what he wants for each and every one of us. God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly love your purpose and live your life. In order for you or any of us to align our will with the divine will, we have to believe that God’s plans for us are good and that he means us good. That’s why the enemy works overtime to either convince you that God doesn’t exist or that if he does exist, he doesn’t care or he’s mean or at the very least he’s capricious or disinterested. That’s why the core lie is that God is holding out on you or that God doesn’t care or that God doesn’t exist.

 

If you believe that lie, which at some point, every single one of us has believed it on some level or another, then you don’t align your will with the divine will because you don’t trust him. You don’t trust God to have your best interests at heart. I have a few scriptures here from the Bible that shares what God’s plan is and what his offer is for you. Psalm 16, 11, “You have made known to me the path of life.” John 5:40, “Come to me and have life.” That’s Jesus talking. Acts 5:20, “Tell the people the full message of this new life.” That’s St. Paul talking. Romans 6:4, “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the father, now we also may live new lives.” The offer is life but you have to actively choose it and then you have to fight for it but it’s very strategic.

C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, wrote this in Mere Christianity. “One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a dark power in the universe. A mighty evil spirit who was held to be the power behind death, disease and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God and was good when he was created and went wrong. Christianity agrees the universe is at war.”

If you don’t understand the nature of reality, it’s that the offer is life. The point and the objective of God is restoration, healing, abundant life, and everything good that comes from the father. If you don’t understand that, then you’re susceptible to deception because what the enemy does is he steals, kills and destroys, then he blames it on God or he says, “God could have stopped this and he didn’t.” That is the lie that gets us to live separately from or to resist aligning ourselves and submitting our will to the divine will. The fight for abundant life is what I call the internal work or the fight for healing.

The Fight For Abundant Life

The fight for abundant life is what the Rise to Reign framework is for. The fight for abundant life is the work of healing. It’s recovering what was stolen, restoring what was broken, and returning to the original design. When I first start talking about the Rise to Reign framework, the cornerstone or the thing that we build the whole thing out on is that we were all created for a perpetual state of righteousness, which is alignment, feeling and doing right, right relationship with God, right relationship with ourselves and right relationship with others.

Peace, which is Shalom, which is a Hebrew concept of nothing missing, nothing broken. It’s not just calm feelings. It’s a life that is in order. Nothing is missing, nothing broken, total abundance and joy, which is a calm sense of delight, which is feeling joyful. The fight is for healing. The offer is life but you have to choose it and you have to fight for it. The fight is for healing, which is recovering what was stolen, restoring what was broken, and returning to the original design. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.” That’s the healing that we’re talking about.

The attacks or trauma are always aimed at the image of God. They’re always aimed at your image-bearing. Trauma is always aimed at your image-bearing, either your identity or your sovereignty or any number of aspects that we’ve covered. Healing is correcting our perception of God, ourselves and others, and the world or the nature of reality. This is a strategic and important thing to grasp. You might even want to read to this more than once to grasp the nature of reality and your part in it.

The struggle is real but the battle is strategic. Just because you’ve been transitioned into the kingdom of light doesn’t mean all your troubles are over. Let’s say that you make a decision, “I want to align my will with the divine will. I want to be translated out of darkness into the kingdom of light.” That’s a prayer that you say that you do not consent to darkness and that you align yourself with Christ’s kingdom. Once you’ve done that, you’re translated into the kingdom light. It’s that simple.

If you don't actively align yourself with the light, you are at the mercy of chaos, meaningless death, and destruction. Click To Tweet

It doesn’t mean though that all your troubles are over. This is where we began the process of discipleship, where we begin to mold ourselves or allow ourselves to be molded into the image and the likeness of Christ or Christ-likeness, which is our example. That’s all it means to follow Christ, which is a perfect example of unconditional love. Discipleship is not about following a bunch of rules and giving up all of your favorite things that you love to do. It’s about aligning yourself and allowing yourself to be molded into the image of the perfect and unconditional love of the father as expressed through the Son, Jesus Christ.

John 16:33 says, “In this world, you’ll have trouble but take heart. I have overcome the world.” Once you align with the right kingdom, that’s just the first step. Now we are going to go through a process, but it’s strategic. It isn’t random. God is in control. That’s something that is important. He’s good and he’s in ultimate control. He’s sovereign. He is sovereign over your life. He’s sovereign over the whole entire world, the entire multiverse. Romans 8:28 says, “All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes.” Your battles are strategic. There are divine guard rails. It’s training for rain, but you have to see it that way or you will lose heart and suffer.

Here’s what we teach in Rise to Reign. When we go through a process, when you either go through the eCourse or coaching or you come to a live event, we look at your life. We rewrite the meaning to an empowering meaning, the things that you’ve suffered to an empowering meaning. We identify patterns and we begin to unwind and heal trauma. You begin to see in hindsight or in retrospect the order of your life. That in itself is so healing because it can feel like when life is hard. It can feel like it’s all totally random and what is even the point. Once you begin to see the meaning behind your pain and the purpose that you’re here for, and all of that was meant to move you forward.

Remember, we talked about how God is sovereign but he puts these guard rails around our lives so that we get to the destination. Hopefully, we have free will that makes it problematic sometimes for us to get to where we’re going. We get lots of chances, nudges and experiences that are hopefully moving us to align our lives and our will with the divine will and get where we’re going.

There are three reasons that we experience adversity. The first one is transgression. When we’re on the wrong path, life becomes increasingly difficult because God wants us healed. He loves us too much to let us go astray. We have all these ideas about how what’s going to make us feel good and what’s going to make us fulfilled. Most of the time, we’re wrong. Most of the time, we’ve been deceived into believing that the thing we think is going to give us so much pleasure or the thing that makes us so happy is going to end up bringing death and destruction. It’s a trick and a trap.

God puts these guard rails around our life and makes it so that life becomes increasingly difficult so that we’ll start looking for healing. I love the story of the Prodigal Son in the Bible. He takes his inheritance and he goes off drinking and whoring. He spends all his money and he winds up in the pigpen. He finally comes to his senses and he’s like, “Why did I leave my dad’s house? Everything was great there.” He thought that pleasure was going to fulfill him. That’s usually what we think until we experience it and we get the thing. It comes up empty. God is always drawing us back into relationships and back into alignment with life circumstances.

When we’re on the wrong path, life can become increasingly difficult because God wants us healed and he wants us aligned. The solution when we’re experiencing that adversity is to repent. There’s so much religious garbage around his word. All that repent means is to change your mind and go in a different direction. That’s it. I love Dr. Phil. I used to watch him all the time in the early 2000s. They were fighting for their limitations and saying all of their opinions. Dr. Phil will be like, “How’s that working out for you?” They’re in this big mess and they’re fighting for the very things that are keeping them in a mess. God sits there and he’s like, “How’s that working out for you?”

 

When you come to the decision point where you’re like, “Not very good,” then that’s repentance. You’re like, “Maybe I’m going to try it your way. Maybe I’ll try something different.” That’s repentance. It’s changing your mind and going a different way. Hebrews 12:6 says, “Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and he chastens everyone he accepts as a son.” It’s such a manifestation of God’s grace for us to experience challenges when we’re going the wrong way. You could look at them as divine roadblocks like, “Danger, turnaround.” I can relate to this. Some of us are stubborn and it takes a lot of pain to get us to think and go, “Maybe what I’m doing isn’t working. Maybe I should try something different.”

The first one is transgression. The solution is repentance. The second one is training. We experience difficulty to tease the wounds to the surface for healing and to strengthen us for the next level of our calling. The solution to this type of adversity is to do the work. Psalm 144:1 says, “Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” Hebrews 12:11 says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

I talked about this either in the previous episode or the one before it. I’ve undergone a lot of difficulty and trauma in my life. It’s prepared me to handle and to carry the calling and the purpose and the work that I do now and I can see that. When I can see that, when I look at it that way, it’s like, “That was worth it.” I get to help other people. I get to be a beacon in a dark place because I went through that. Would I go through it again? I think I would because it allowed me to be here. At the time, I didn’t see that and I wouldn’t have ever chosen it. In retrospect, this is how healing happens. In retrospect, you can look back on your life and see how God was always with you, guiding you and leading you.

The point of life is not pleasure. I’m going to throw that out there. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure and we need pleasure. We’re designed for pleasure. Pleasure is not bad but it isn’t the point of life. If you make pleasure the point of your life, your life is going to be empty and suck. Pleasure comes from aligning your will with the divine will. It says in Matthew, “Seek first the kingdom,” which is righteousness, peace and joy, “And all of these things will be added to you.” If you keep it that in that order, you get the righteousness, peace and joy, which is pleasure. If you get it out of order and you seek the pleasure and you seek the things, you don’t get anything. You might get a little bit of pleasure but it’s meaningless and mindless. I hope that makes sense.

The third reason that we had experienced adversity is testing. Right before we’re promoted, typically, we’ll encounter a time of testing. The higher the promotion, the tougher the test. The solution here is to endure and pass the test. It takes some discernment and a good coach or some wise guides or eyes that are outside to help you discern what one of these three you’re undergoing because they all have a different response. If you read the chapter of Job, you see these principles playing out where he was tested severely, but then God restored double to him. He had a calling and a purpose going forward.

The three reasons we experienced our adversity are transgression, the solution is repentance. Training, the solution is to do the work. Testing, the solution is indoor. The point is if your will is submitted to God’s will, nothing is ever random. The moment that you submit and align your will with the divine will, the divine blueprint starts to come through your life. In that way, you get the incredible privilege and honor of being a co-creator with God. We’re never more like God than when we are creating or when we are healing. When we are uplifting our fellow man and humanity. My friends, that is it for episode eighteen. Thank you so much for being here with me. I will see you soon.

Important Links:

• Mere Christianity

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